Early on in his career, he was likely the most promising apprentice in the country, like a Pike, or a Breasley, or a Demon Darb Munro. At five-foot-seven, he was tall for a jockey and short for a man, but he had the perfect physique for riding, and a metabolism people would die for; he seemed unable to put on weight. The downside was that his face looked hastily assembled, like the manufacturers were in a rush. But that depended who you asked. A girl named Catherine Jamison thought he wasn’t half too bad. She loved his cluttered face and good-green eyes, and that she could carry him in her arms—till tragedy struck, one morning.
He was twenty-three years old.
Overnight, there was a sudden, metabolic change.
Where once he could eat a whole packet of Tim Tams on race day, now he could eat only the wrapper.
* * *
—
They’d been in the city for a while by then; they’d moved to make a real go of it. Catherine had a nursing job, at the Prince of Wales, near Randwick.
There came a week, a good few years into the stint, when Ted started feeling different. Then, a few hours before first light that day, he’d made the ritual trip to the bathroom, and the scales there didn’t lie; and neither did the mirror. He was simultaneously stretched out and filled in, and his face had lost its tardiness. But what was the good of that? Did he want to be handsome, or ride the perfect miler in the Doncaster? The world stopped making sense.
The worst part was his hands.
In their small apartment kitchen, he didn’t even contemplate his breakfast; he sat at the kitchen table, looking at those hands, and they were the meatiest things he’d ever seen.
* * *
—
For five long years, he worked and fasted.
He steam-roomed.
He lettuce-leaved.
When he read the paper he sat in the car in the heat of day, the windows all up, in his newest, warmest tracksuit. He mowed lawns in jacket and jeans, with a wetsuit underneath. He cramped up, he was irritable. He ran with garbage bags strapped to his legs, under winter woolen pants. These were the spoils of the racing game, and a thousand pent-up dreams—of Crunchie bars and chocolate cake, and impure thoughts of cheese.
There was the usual fare of injuries, too—he was thrown, he broke both wrists. He was kicked in the face in the stables. Trampled twice at trackwork. Once, in Race Three at Warwick Farm, a horse in front threw a shoe; it clipped him over the ear. It could have been many times worse.
By the twilight of his career he was like a soldier, or an ancient charioteer; each race was like going into battle. Through the purgatory in his stomach, and the toothaches, headaches, and dizzy spells, the final insult was a raging case of athlete’s foot, caught from the floor of the jockey room—
“And that,” he often joked to Carey, age seven, in the car on their way to trackwork, “is what got me in the end.”
* * *
—
The thing is, though, Ted Novac was lying, because what got him in the end wasn’t athlete’s foot, or hunger pains, or dehydration and deprivation. It was, of course, a horse:
A chestnut giant, The Spaniard.
The Spaniard was just a sensational horse, bighearted, like Kingston Town, or Phar Lap. On top of that, he was entire, which meant his bloodline could carry on.
He was worked by Ennis McAndrew, the noted broomstick trainer.
When the horse came to his stable, McAndrew made a phone call.
“How much do you weigh these days?”
He’d dialed Ted Novac’s number.
* * *
—